Saturday, February 19, 2011

I watch as the radiology assistant walks away without saying a word. That's odd. I think, she'd been so friendly. "Have a great day!" I shout out trying to cheerily recapture the moment we'd had before. Had I said something? Walking back to my car, holding the heavy portfolio of images, I retrace all of what I can remember I said. I hope I hadn't just blabbered something. I did tend to have a tendency to speak before thinking, especially when I was nervous. And that day, I was nervous. I had two MRIs, and a nerve conduction test scheduled. That was the day that hopefully was going to hold all of the answers. And I was praying they were good ones.

On my way to the next appointment, I call my mother, "how did it go?" she asks. I mumble that I think it went fine, but that I'm not sure because at the end the radiologist who had been so friendly and talkative was suddenly not speaking. It unnerved me on my drive all the way to my next appointment. I couldn't distract myself. The images next to me on the seat screamed at me, LOOK LOOK LOOK LOOK.

By the time I got to the neurologists' office, I had a whopping 15 minutes to kill. The envelope was starting to be a doomsday missive demanding to be looked through, screaming to be devoured like a plate of freshly baked donuts in a police department. My mother continued her mission of trying to distract me from the question of "why did she suddenly start ignoring me" but I could no longer help myself. I reached over and pulled out one sheet of MRI images. And they were scans of my brain. Not normal images, either. My heart stopped.